Monthly Archives: February 2012

Joe Smith has written a blogpost about climate science in the media based on his contribution to a debate at Imperial I ran last month. Smith suggests climate science is a bad fit for the mass media: too slow moving, too complex, too uncertain. Journalists try to spice things up and so reach for shouty, two-sided debates. To Smith, this is understandable though. Rather than complaining that the media gets things wrong, he says climate science needs to offer new, better stories.

Smith’s post comes in the wake of the interesting possibility of a new climate story: last week’s reports of leaked documents purporting to shine a light on the funding and public communication policies of the Heartland Institute. As Bob Ward notes, writing for the New Scientist, labels like “deniergate” and “scepticgate” are being passed around, as in many ways it seems to echo “climategate”. As Republicans for Environmental Protection put it in their press release at the weekend, it does feel like “the shoe is on the other foot”.

I suspect Smith would say the scepticgate line is too much of a riff on the same old tune. It hasn’t really sparked much as a news story, perhaps for similar reasons that the so-called “Climategate2” release didn’t make a huge dent in the news last year: a bit geeky, a bit obscure, a bit more of the bloody same. As Richard Black puts it, his BBC report on the topic is “for anyone who doesn’t spend every week up to their waists in the ordure of climate politics”, the implication being most of his readers wouldn’t have been keeping track. It feels ever so slightly like a really bad sequel. Climategate, glaciergate, climategate2, now scepticgate, deniergate and, according to the latest Heartland press release, fakegate. It’s all a bit like a parody of the sequel to a sequel of a horror movie which in itself was a parody in the first place. Which isn’t to deny the importance of any of the politics or science behind any of these -gates. It’s just that I can understand why the mainstream media haven’t covered the latest episode much.

I also think it’s interesting that, according to Spiegel, the author of a new German book arguing that an impending climate catastrophe is misleading justifies his work as an attempt to “revitalize the deadlocked debate.” Lots of people want to reframe climate communications, they just want to do it on their own terms. And some people find it easier to frame such debates than others. Simply, some voices are louder than others. This, for me, is why the Heartland story is so important. The truth of the allegations (or even truth of climate change) is almost irrelevant here: the key question is whether money and political connections gets your personal view on environmental politics more attention than it necessarily should.

When it comes to offering new stories, I sometimes wonder if climate science is especially badly served in terms of public relations compared to other areas of science. Smith talks about a time he sat next to someone from the IPCC press office at a conference and realised “to my horror that I was sitting next to almost all of the IPCC press office…”. Maybe climate science need to take a leaf out of high energy physics, poach some of the CERN communications team perhaps? Or maybe it’s unfair to compare climate science with high energy physics. Maybe more PR in climate science would just add to criticisms of spin. Maybe we need something else.

Personally, I think that if we’re looking to break any deadlock in climate communications we need to diversify. Instead of focusing on what scientists, politicians and television executives have to say to the public, I prefer a model of inviting people to be part of the ongoing process of learning about our changing climate and thinking about what we might do about it. As Matt Nisbet puts it, “scientists are better off as community-based diplomats than cable news and blogosphere culture warriors”. Go, count hedgehogs or spot contrails. Share and debate science as you do it. Let’s see what new stories we might unearth together.

I took the picture above on my walk home from work earlier this week. It’s the pillar in Seven Dials in central London, which has a had a low energy blue LED light wrapped around it, positioned to show where sea level may be in 1000 years time as part of a city-wide art project to raise awareness of climate change.

The artist’s choice of the colour blue is, I’m sure, due to lots of reasons (e.g. association with water) and the circle reflects the shape of the monument but, intensionally or otherwise, it means the piece echoes London’s blue plaques.

Like many Londoners, I love spotting a blue plaque. Sometimes they remind me of something I knew but had forgotten, or add a geographical tag to something I knew about but didn’t realise was local. Sometimes they highlight something or someone entirely new and I often find myself standing in the street googleing someone I’d never heard of, transported back in time to whenever what they did or who they were was seen as important.

I mean, who is this Thomas Young? (Wimpole Street, or near there anyway, spotted on my cycle to work a few months back). And isn’t it kind of cool that we once would someone as “a man of science”, like we might “a man of letters”? Similarly, it’s slightly amazing that this otherwise unassuming housing estate in the East End turns out to be where William Henry Perkin accidentally fulled the industrial revolution when he stumbled across a purple dye.

Such memorials provide a chance to stop and think about something because we’ve stumbled across a relevant point in space, in the same way a google doodle invites us to think of someone or something just because of a particular point in time.

Not all such signs in London are blue of course, and not all are there in celebration. Take this monument to the victims of BSE, for example, which glowers at the Houses of Parliament from an otherwise unassuming patch of wall by a hospital on the south side of the river Thames.

I think my favourite plaque at the moment is one on the Caledonian Road, to a giant ice well that was sited there in the late 19th century. I’m not sure why it’s green, and it doesn’t have an institutional reference on it (some say London County Council, English Heritage or British History of Comedy Society or something so you know who put them up). It marks a point when people in London decided it was a good idea to transport 1500 tones of ice from Norway and store it in a well just north of Kings Cross. That was kind of a weird thing to do, no? I spotted it a couple of weeks ago, when it was freezing cold and it certainly seemed particularly weird then. Its weirdness made me think in turn about how weird it is that we have fridge freezers, the now familiarity of such objects, and the ease we might procure ice today, made me think about the way the ability to control the temperature of things around us is a reasonably recent technological achievement (one, thinking back to that artistically placed ring around the pillar in Seven Dials, we may pay for, and indeed maybe fleeting).

What makes these blue circles different from the plaques is that they are about a possible future, not London’s past. They are rooted in science, but also in a way fictional, or at least they are not anchored in anything we can easily recognise or look up. I did feel that this is a slight failing in this art work, there didn’t seem to be a sign saying what they were about. I wanted some explanatory material to go with the spooky glowing ring. I happened to remember having read about them in the paper when I spotted it, so could google from that, but I’m sure most people would just walk by. I guess that is often a challenge for science communication (especially risk communication) compared to the cosiness of historical memorials, which the art work is playing with in itself. Still, I personally wanted them to deal with this a bit more on the site. Maybe there is a sign and I just didn’t spot it, but I should have been able to spot it if the sign was working.

The art work is called Plunge London if you want to know more and their website has some details of both the science behind the future they predict and the history the blue circles’ sites reflect. It’s around until the 4th March and there are other blue rings in Paternoster Square, near St Paul’s Cathedral, and the Duke of York Column by the Royal Society, just West of Trafalgar Square.

It’s world radio day! I don’t know about you, but I’m celebrating. I love the radio.

I think I just like noise. Maybe it’s because my Dad was a musician. He usually worked from home, on what are probably best described as “musicians’ hours”, so there was a steady stream of odd bits of organised noise coming from his office. He was always very focused on the quality of sounds around him, taking personal offense to musac and swearing loudly every time the doorbell rang or a car horn beeped to interrupt the more controlled flow of noise around him. As an orchestrator, it was the particular sound any instrument made which interested him most, and he’d come home from a recording session full of stories of standing out the back of Abbey Road studios with percussionists hitting bin lids. I’m not a musician, but I seem to have picked up some of his obsession sound.

On the run up to this, I’ve been thinking about how I could share the noises of my research. I’m a humanities scholar so mainly just sit in an office on my own. There’s the sound of an email hitting my inbox I guess, or maybe the bell ringing from the tower outside my office at Imperial or people gossiping over a cigarette by the window I sit near at UCL. There is also a really cool whistling sound that happens on a windy day in the space between the engineering departements at Imperial. Some day I really must record that. Or the glass bridge at the Science Museum. It’s held up by piano strings so makes a slight sound as you walk across it. It’s usually too loud to hear in the museum, with all the visitors, but when I worked there I’d sometimes walk across it when the museum was closed, lean out to pluck a string and just listen. There are probably other noises around my work I don’t think about. I’m going to have to take time to think and listen.

I also thought I’d share my top five listens in terms of science and technology; the podcasts I feel my week isn’t complete if I haven’t heard.

BBC World Service Click – I’m not just saying this because the presenter has an office next door to mine at Imperial. The global perspective on technology it provides is simply fascinating. It’s something I don’t get from a lot of the other sci/tech media I consume, and really makes me think about technology in different ways. Like the Guardian tech podcast, I also find it invaluable as a briefing on media issues.

Radiolab – It’s hard to describe quite how brilliant RadioLab is. Very simply, it is storytelling about science at its best. It will make you cry and laugh out loud in the middle of the street and you won’t care that it makes you look a bit weird because you are simply so absorbed in it. It is that good. Really.

Guardian Science Weekly – There are a few science magazine radio shows out there, but this is my personal favorite. It updates me on the news and will add in the odd interesting feature and/ or interview too. There is a lovely chatty feel to it, a nice mix of humble and strident, and fun too. I’m also a huge fan of the Nature one, though it’s slightly more serious.

In Our Time – Again, not always science, but rather the history of ideas, which often touches on science. The presenter can sometimes be a bit deferent to scientific expertise for my personal taste, but it’s usually a good clever chat about something interesting and often has Simon Schaffer on it (I’m happy to admit to being a huge Schaffer fangirl). The archive is prestigious.

So, what are your favourite science and technology themed podcasts? I’d love to know. Also, do you work in a lab? Does your machinery, building or colleages make interesting noises? Maybe you could record it on your phone or something and share it? (Audioboo is good for this). Share your science noises!

Oxburgh chaired the event, with a panel comprising of Louise Gray (Environment Correspondent, Telegraph), James Randerson (Environment and Science News Editor, Guardian), James Painter (Reuters Institute, University of Oxford) and Joe Smith (Open University), along with questions from our undergraduates.

A couple of students and tutors later told me they felt the panelists were too similar, that there wasn’t enough ‘debate’ and they’d have liked to see a climate sceptic. I take that point, but also disagree with it. There was, if you listen carefully, a fair bit of diversity within the discussion. It wasn’t one side vs. the other, and just because the panellists tended to be polite and smile and nod at each other didn’t mean they were all coming from the same position.

It’s worth reflecting on how we identify a ‘debate’ here. Debates do not always have to be a battle of two opposing views. Personally, I’d say that’s often the least productive sort of debate you can have. They can also just be a group of people playing with a particular issue; a matter of chatting to gradually identify problems and reflect on possible answers. Indeed, this question of how we structure and spot the debate within climate science was a key topic of this particular event, as it was in our previous class, with Brian Hoskins.

James Painter started things off by stressing there are many types of uncertainty involved in the public discussion of climate change, including many types of scepticism: ‘there are many ways you can question and be uncertain about climate science’. Drawing on his Poles Apart report, he suggested four types: people who are sceptical that global warming is happening, those who a sceptical that it is due to human action, those who are sceptical about aspects of climate change’s impact and people who are sceptical about specific policies.

For his presentation, Joe Smith argued that in many ways climate science makes for a rubbish story in the mass media. There is simply too much of a consensus: too many of the experts agree, what really is there to report? He said he used to think the consensus on climate change was a good thing, but it does make it unreportably dull, which is why the contrarian views get pulled in, to liven it up. There isn’t enough of an edge, maybe we need more of an edge? Gray echoed this in discussion, saying we should pay attention to more of the ‘dodgy things’ going on around climate change – subsidies, inefficiencies of NGOs – that the real stories are less about sceptic vs non-sceptic and more about who is doing the right thing, how and when. Randerson and Oxburgh seemed slightly more cautious of Smith’s call for more arguments, laughing ‘careful what you wish for’ and noting the ways a stronger sense of disagreement plays in the US and Australia. I wonder if that misses Smith and Gray’s point though, which to me was more of a call to open up the political edginess of climate change policy. It was about the disagreements at the end of Painter’s typology of sceptics: debate over what to do about climate change, not whether it is happening or why.

For me, this was summed up in a comment from Gray near the end of the evening: ‘there’s a lot of heat and fire around a few sceptical people, but maybe that is the wrong focus’.

POST is the UK Parliament’s in-house office for analysis of science policy issues. Obviously it could do a lot more than it does and there are oodles of problems with it, yadda, yadda, yadda, but it’s Friday and I think they’re worthy of a little celebration.

About 20-30 times a year they publish briefing notes on specific issues. These vary, but can be brilliantly clear introductions to the often highly complex, multi-disciplinary and uncertain issues of science and technology policy. They’ve just published their 400th POSTnote, on climate variability and weather. These are often produced by young scientists on a placement and according to the POST twitter account, this one was produced with the assistance of Matt Ashfold, a NERC funded PhD student from Cambridge.

The whole archive of POSTnotes is worth a look though. A great resource and, for science policy geeks, a great way to loose a few hours on a cold afternoon.